An Exclusive Look at the All England Lawn Tennis Club’s Social Strategy for Wimbledon

Wimbledon is the longest running and most prestigious of the four major tennis championships. In addition to its huge yearly television audience and the fans willing to wait weeks outside for tickets, the Wimbledon Twitter account boasts 1.2 million followers and its Facebook page, 2.4 million likes. With tennis on everyone’s minds midway through the U.S. Open, Lost Remote gained exclusive access to data from the All England Lawn Tennis Club’s (AELTC) partnership with Grabyo– a cloud-based, real-time video solution provider that helps broadcasters monetize clips – this past June and July.

The AELTC installed video feeds on its three main courts, each of which was integrated with Grabyo Studio. Grabyo created a Wimbledon-branded video gallery on Wimbledon.com and ensured that the AELTC was set up to share real-time video across social, web, and mobiles apps. “The ease with which Grabyo Studio allowed us to create social videos as part of our content offering and distribute them to our global digital audience was very impressive,” said Alexandra Willis, Content and Communications Manager at the AELTC.

Over the course of the tournament, the AELTC shared more than 300 video clips across Facebook and Twitter, generating over 3.5 million plays. Facebook generated over 1.5 million views while Twitter generated 1.4 million; nearly 600,000 were viewed on the Grabyo-powered Wimbledon.com video gallery.

The most viewed clip of the tournament featured Nick Kyrgios hitting a winner during his match against Rafa Nadal. The video generated over 447,000 clip views and 27,924 Facebook interactions. The match itself also generated an impressive 660,250 tweets, peaking at 11,393 tweets per minute.

Grabyo’s video offering is in a mobile-first format, but two-thirds of Wimbledon’s social clip views were across the desktop.

“We were very pleased with the outcome of this initiative, which proved the value of being able to produce content quickly in response to real-time events. The clips drove an impressive level of organic social media engagement and buzz, while also encouraging Wimbledon fans to tune-in, and also providing us with content for the rest of our digital channels.,” continued Willis. “There is clearly enormous potential to take this type of content further in partnership with our broadcast partners but we were delighted with the results in our first year of working with Grabyo.”